You've reached the Virginia Cooperative Extension Newsletter Archive.
These files cover more than ten years of newsletters posted on our old website
(through April/May 2009), and are provided for historical purposes only.
As such, they may contain out-of-date references and broken links.

Farmers in the Mississippi Delta had serious and unexpected problems with
Monsantos new Roundup Ready cotton during the 1997 growing season.
Introduced commercially this year by Monsanto and Delta and Pine Land seed
company, the cotton is genetically engineered to tolerate the pesticide
company's best-selling weed killer, glyphosate (Roundup). In early August,
some Roundup Ready cotton growers began finding deformed bolls and bolls
that dropped off the plants. By fall, nearly 30,000 acres in Mississippi
alone were affected. Some growers face losses of $500,000 to $1,000,000.
About one-fourth of the almost 200 Mississippi farmers licensed to grow the
transgenic cotton have taken their complaints to the state Seed Arbitration
Council, as a first step in trying to recoup expected losses. Once the
Council evaluates this fall's yield data and issues rulings, farmers are
free to take their cases to court.

Company and university scientists are searching for clues to what went
wrong with the transgenic cotton. So far they have been able to establish
that the boll problems are associated with Roundup Ready cotton, but only
20% of the cotton with the new gene is affected. Investigators are looking
for other factors such as soil type, weather conditions, and Roundup
applications that might have interacted with the engineered gene to cause
the abnormalities. Whatever the mechanism turns out to be, boll
development is not obviously related to herbicide resistance and would not
have been predicted as an outcome of adding a resistance gene. The boll
problems appear to contradict industry claims that gene splicing is a
precise technology which allows scientists to reliably predict risks based
on knowledge about the added genes.

The abnormal boll development apparently escaped detection under the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) oversight program. Within the federal
regulatory framework for biotechnology, the Department is charged with
determining that transgenic crops are safe for agriculture and the
environment before allowing them to be commercialized. The Roundup Ready
cotton was approved after passing USDA's field testing and
commercialization requirements for genetically engineered crops. This is
the second time in two years that one of Monsanto's transgenic crops has
suffered a performance failure that was apparently not revealed during
field testing. Last summer, the company's Bt cotton failed to meet many
farmers' expectations that it would control the cotton bollworm.